Toyota GR86, 86, FR-S and Subaru BRZ Forum & Owners Community - FT86CLUB - Nameless Downpipe/Overpipe Install *pics*

Hey guys. I wanted to share my experience with the 3" DP/OP install, but first I want to share what happened which lead to the purchase. In June of 2014 I bought a C38 Kraftwerks supercharger kit but I wanted to keep everything quiet because I was on a little bit of a budget. So, I kept the factory header overpipe and downpipe, but upgraded the catback to a 2.5" Perrin resonated. To my suprise, about a week ago during start up I saw a few huge chunks of what appeared to be muffler packing being blown out of the exhaust.

http://i189.photobucket.com/albums/z...pszyveya0u.jpg

I also noticed how bad the exhaust smelled. I thought either the factory or Perrin resonator or muffler was damaged by the broken cat somehow, but upon inspecting both resonators and mufflers I found no damage, only specks of cat converter stuck to the exhaust walls. After removing the DP which contains the second cat, I found that the catalyst was completely gone! I guess those secondary cats have muffler packing in them as well.

http://i189.photobucket.com/albums/z...pskwdbug37.jpg

So I bought this guy:

http://i189.photobucket.com/albums/z...pskovo5yri.jpg

Removing the downpipe was pretty straight forward, but the heatshield on the overpipe needed to be removed to make room for the twisting and turning that needed to happen. This part is removed by pulling the overpipe toward the front of the car. No Problem.

Getting the new DP in was where my problem started. Being that there is so little space to remove the DP to begin with, trying to get a larger unit in there is impossible especially with the 4 extra feet of pipe attached to it. So I had to lift the engine about 3 inches; but to do that I needed to take the front bumper off to remove the intake from the supercharger. It was also necessary to remove the plug and cable from the alternator.

http://i189.photobucket.com/albums/z...pssh2so6hh.jpg

Lucky for us there's only 2 14mm bolts inside the cradle holding the engine in place. The alignment of the bolts from the engine mounts do seem to become misaligned due to the angle its moving. I was a little worried that I would have to do some finagling with a pry bar but the mounts lined right back up when I lowered it.

http://i189.photobucket.com/albums/z...psujkqk7vc.jpg

There's really nowhere to lift the engine, so I chose to use a piece of wood on a jack to evenly disperse the wieght across the factory header. I'm sure there's a better way of doing this without compromising the header, but maybe I'll give myself an excuse to buy a header too.

A good indicator for the correct height the engine needs to be is this tab here by the ECU:

http://i189.photobucket.com/albums/z...psmfh0zcd9.jpg

After that happened, I had just enough room to fit the front flange between the engine and cradle. I found the best thing to do here was to line up the bolts and finger tighten the bolts to the header before slowly lowering the engine back to its resting position.

http://i189.photobucket.com/albums/z...psgtuanvag.jpg

The new downpipe clears the cradle by millimeters and currently on start up the DP rattles enough to strike the cradle. I didn't really feel like attempting to realign it at the time of the install, but I'm sure I can get it to clear the cradle a bit better.

http://i189.photobucket.com/albums/z...psj7cridjc.jpg

Success! The new downpipe is installed and the exhaust note sounds nearly exactly as it did before the cat gutted itself. I did have to flatten out the bracket and straighten out the cat back aftwr install to make everything stop banging around in there. Overall its a great fit and of course the smell is gone. That was lots of fun. Now to check the tune.